Robert Glazer - Elevate Your Team: Empower Your Team To Reach Their Full Potential and Build A Business That Builds Leaders (Ignite Reads)

I couldnt decide if I was a genius or an idiot.

It was 2017, and the company I founded, Acceleration Partners (AP), had just completed another year of double-digit growth. We had also recently won three consecutive Inc. 500 awards from 2013 to 2015, an honor bestowed each year to the five hundred fastest-growing private companies in America.

From the outside, we were on a fast track, but the view from inside the company told a different story.

Even though we had a healthy company culture and had even won a few Best Places to Work awards, we had an emerging talent development problem that threatened to jeopardize our growth and our culture.

The problem wasnt a fundamental failure to develop our people. In fact, several of our hires from the early years of AP were keeping pace with our growth and would go on to take important executive leadership roles.

However, there was an increasingly large group of employees who struggled to keep pace. While they improved each year, they werent growing as fast as the company. Despite their progress, these employees still fell behind and often hit a wall at the worst possible time.

For a made-up example of our challenge (for obvious legal and ethical reasons), imagine we hired a Marketing Manager to oversee our marketing portfolio. While the manager improved in their first year at the company, within a year or two, AP grew so quickly that we found ourselves needing director-level work on our marketing team: a leader who could build and manage a team of marketers rather than just an individual contributor who could execute marketing projects. To be fair, we needed both roles.

In situations like this oneand we had severalwe had a choice to make with a relatively new manager who was talented but objectively not ready to step up to the director level and lead a team. This type of scenario presents a few options that dont feel so great:

1. Hire a director above them, wounding their pride in the process.
2. Transition them out of the company, and replace them with a director.
3. Promote them into a director role they arent ready for, hope for the best, and then try to find a new manager.

The first choice is logical but often turns a high performer into an unengaged employee; they believe leadership doesnt trust them to step up, and they feel disappointed going from being in charge to having someone else take over.

The second choice is efficient, but it diminishes trust throughout the company when people start to believe theyll be replaced whenever your business takes a leap forward. Plus, you lose a good manager who knows how to deliver marketing outcomes for the company, creating at least a temporary setback.

The third choice is the path companies usually take, especially with people who have performed well up to that point. Promoting from within is cheaper and faster than hiring someone new, and it boosts a businesss reputation on the recruiting and retention fronts. But while this route can often yield a surprise overperformer, it can also create poor outcomes for both the employee and the company, especially if the newly promoted director finds themselves in over their head and their team suffers as a result.

We found ourselves facing these types of decisions regularly. Our employees were improving, just not quite fast enough, and we didnt have a clear strategy to address that challenge. If youre a leader of a team, department, or organization with this type of high-growth trajectory, youve probably experienced this same conundrum.

In the moment, I was stumped. But looking back, I see so clearly that I possessed the answer to this exact problem. I just had not yet been able to connect the dots.

During the same year we were facing these challenges, I had hit a similar roadblock personally. I was struggling to get any publisher interest in my second book. Tentatively titled Friday Forward , the book was a selection of fifty-two short stories from my weekly newsletter of the same name, which had grown from a weekly note sent to my team of forty to a global audience of nearly one hundred thousand readers worldwide. Even though I knew the content of the messages resonated with so many people each week, every publisher gave me the same feedback: they werent excited about a compilation.

Im not quick to give up, but I was nearly ready to accept that the timing for the book just wasnt right. But then my literary agent gave me a challenge that changed everything: rather than pitching a compilation of the best stories from the newsletter, he pushed me to pull the key themes and ideas from those stories and attempt to shape them into a concept for a book.

After all Id invested in building an audience for Friday Forward , I figured it was worth a shot.

After nearly a year of digging through newsletters and developing a cohesive framework based on the lessons of those stories and lots of discussions, I arrived at the capacity building framework that served as the basis for my eventual second book: Elevate .

In Elevate , I defined capacity building as the method through which individuals seek, acquire, and develop the skills and abilities to consistently perform at a higher level in pursuit of their innate potential. That book was entirely focused on individual capacity building across personal and professional life in four key areasspiritual, intellectual, physical, and emotional. One of the core principles of capacity building is the idea that each of us is the same person at work and outside it, and lasting achievement in one of those spheres is dependent on growth in the other.

The principles, tactics, and tools I articulated in Elevate were the same things Id done to level up as a leader for years to that point and had started to share with our emerging leaders. But it was only once I finished my first draft of Elevate and had the capacity building framework laid out clearly that I had my idiot-genius epiphany: I had spent years cultivating all these ideas for individual growth and performance, but I failed to realize those same ideas could form the backbone of our employee development strategy.